Love Your Enemy | Jesus and Nonviolence | Part 2 | Courtney Clark

Transcript: Love Your Enemy

We’re going to take a break this week from our parables series, which I know we just started. There’s a lot going on in the world right now that I would be doing a disservice to myself and to our community if ignored and went on like everything is fine. First I want to say, those of you who are feeling afraid, unsafe, or unsure if you want to raise your kids in this country anymore. I hear you, I am you! And I can’t ignore the violence that occurred not far from us in Uvalde or Buffalo just a few days ago. Which is why we’re pivoting this week and I want to go back to our conversation on Jesus and non-violence from a few weeks ago.

Our country has felt like it’s in a downward spiral for a long time now, and it seems to be picking up pace. For a long time I thought I could shove my head in the sand and pretended like none of it was happening, and maybe things would get better because this is supposed to be the best country in the world. But I can’t anymore, and I’ve been looking to Jesus for answers on how to do this differently. For ways I can tactfully fight for the world I want for my kids. Everything inside of me is raging, at the pain, the hate, the disconnect, and the active dismissal of humanity all around us. We talk so much about bringing heaven to earth now, and I usually see it all around me. But this week, right now I don’t see it all. I see the country I’ve lived in my entire life and hoped to raise my kids in, burning to the ground. This week, I feel the pain deeply. School shootings aren’t new. But in the midst of everything else, this one feels like the icing on the cake. Since about 2016-ish (and probably long before that, that’s just when I really started to notice) there’s been a disconnect forming between us, a collective all of us. And things have been unraveling at the seems. It doesn’t feel so united anymore, but more every man for himself, from the top all the way down.

So my question today, as cliché as it maybe, what would Jesus do? If he was here, in the midst of the pain and the suffering. In the midst of children killing children. In the midst of a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, or where rights are being threatened every day, what would Jesus have to say? There are groups who certainly claim Jesus would be the one wielding the sword and telling teachers they what they can and cannot talk about in their classrooms, or the one refusing to wear a mask, or shouting from the rooftops that the only solution would be for teachers to carry firearms to school. But to be honest, I don’t want any part of that Jesus. That Jesus seems hateful and violent. The Jesus I know finds the humanity in everyone and celebrates it, the Jesus I know fights power imbalance with non-violence. The Jesus I know fought for community and urged his followers to share their resources rather than hoarding it for themselves.

Last time we talked about non-violence we talked about the creative power that goes into creating this as a new way of life. That it’s not an automatic response when we’re faced with an uncomfortable power dynamic, so we must practice it and always be thinking of and creating a third way when it seems as if there are no choices. Today it feels like there are no choices. I’ve talked to several families who are looking at options to move to another country where guns are in the very least regulated or even outlawed. I’ve had some of those very conversations with my husband. But what if there’s a third way? And I’m not saying leaving for a better world is a bad option, but it’s also not feasible for many of us, it’s financially expensive and emotionally expensive to uproot your entire life and hopefully find refuge somewhere safer. Not to mention the years long waiting list for visa status. So for those of who can’t run, or plan to run but are in the very long process, what do we do? Is there a third way?

I think yes transitioning to live in the third way requires creativity, but staying there requires community. This is something we don’t have anymore in our country. There’s this stigma that we can be all and do all by ourselves, and there’s immense shame if we can’t. Asking for help feels like giving up. It hasn’t always been this way, people talk about the village, so it existed at one point. I remember as a kid my mom sending me outside and I’d find 5-6 other kids playing out front. We’d alternate on whose house provided snacks and drinks for the day and not go home until dinner. In our neighborhood now we know one family, everyone we only see as they back out of their garage for work. If I didn’t know any better I’d say the houses were all empty. Gone are the days of sending my kid next door or down the street to grandma when I’m at my wits end. Everyone is too busy and too focused on their own lives. More and more it feels like I don’t have a place to belong, more and more it feels like I’m disposable. And if I’m hurting how much more is everyone else? How much more are those who don’t have a church, or a supportive spouse, or the one neighbor to talk to? I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop wondering that if I’m feeling this deep sense of emptiness now, how will my kids experience the world when they grow up? How different could our world be if kids had more than just their parents but an entire community of people loving and supporting them. How much violence can we prevent if this kid in Uvalde had had even one person to sit and cry with him through the pain, to help him find the resources and the help he needed to overcome whatever pain he was in? Would any of those kids have had to die?

I’m by no means making excuses for the murderers in Uvalde or in Buffalo, their actions were gruesome, violent, and disturbing. Something that shouldn’t have happened. And no one will ever know why this person performed such a heinous crime. But something like this, happening so close to home is a reminder to me, of the lack of community for all of us. There is healing in community, restoration, change, grace, and peace. Just like after 9/11 and Columbine, communities came together and we found a sense of togetherness that wasn’t there before as our nation worked toward healing. Unfortunately, violent acts like that have become common enough it’s almost easy for us to ignore them. Gone are the days people rally together after violence and find a new way of moving forward instead we stand around and send hopes and prayers all the while holding with white knuckles to policies that contribute and even allow things like this to happen. I’m not here to talk about policy change or my stance on gun ownership and the second amendment. But rather, I want to hold space for those who are grieving, those who are afraid, and then I want us to stand our ground and find a new way. Everything inside of me wants to burn it all to the ground and start over. To live in a place where my kids can attend school and I know they’ll come home at the end of the day. Or where people of color can run to the supermarket and not be gunned down because of the color of their skin. But that’s not our reality, and violence only breeds more violence. There must be a new way, a third way. The way Jesus was an example of again and again, fighting violence and oppression with malicious compliance, standing in rage, fighting back with non-violence.

A way of living that can’t be done alone, that can’t be done without community. For real change to come about we need a community of people willing to hope for change in the very people who hate us. The very people who support the things we stand against. In the people who white knuckle to their gun rights making them more important than the lives of innocent children. To the people who have positions of power and refuse to do anything other than send hopes and prayers. If we are so angry we can’t see their humanity and their potential for change, we become part of the problem rather than the solution. Author Narayan Desai who was a follower of Gandhi puts it this way,

“Non-violence presupposes a level of humanness- however low it may be, in every human being.”

To live in non-violence we must be willing and able to see God even in the smallest of fraction in EVERYONE, there is no-one and certainly no entire group of people in who the light of God has been totally extinguished. So faith in God is having faith and hope that anyone, no matter their past or their stance on policy, can change. This started with Jesus, but it became a reality within the community he was a part of. He lived in such a way, that others joined him. Change didn’t happen over night it took generations of people living in this third way, hoping for change, actively pushing against systems of power with non-violence.

The very heart of the third way, is love. True love for ALL of humanity. Community is not merely a place for like minded people to gather together, rather community in a larger sense is finding belonging. Finding that you’re worthy of being loved, and allowing the love of God and the love of others to shower over you. The people we disagree with have this same deep seated NEED for belonging just as we do. Shame researcher Brene Brown says this:

“A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men, and children. We are biologically, congenitally, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others.”

She goes on to define belonging as “the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us.” So as we fight oppression and find the third way, we must recognize the very real humanity in our enemy. We must love our enemy. Which means we recognize the very people, who hold up and contribute to oppressive systems of power, as children of God.

Jesus repeated the two greatest commandments to his followers; love God and love your neighbor. But he takes it even a step further by defining the neighbor as the Good Samaritan. Or the man who cared sacrificially for the person he would have considered his enemy. Then he goes so far as to say in Mark 5:44

“But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Jesus here isn’t giving a pass to abuse. Enemies would not have been a foreign idea to Jesus and his followers. They were working class citizens in an occupied territory. In which the Roman Empire used force and terror to wield their power. This was a deeply persecuted people. Jesus’s urge to love the enemy wouldn’t have been taken lightly then, just as it is not taken lightly now. As we talked about with the sermon on the Mount a few weeks ago. Jesus isn’t urging passivity here. Instead he’s urging his followers to take the high road. Don’t become the things you despise about Rome. Don’t turn around and torture them for torturing you. Instead love them, see their potential for change. Love them, and see that maybe just maybe one day they’ll look you in the eye and see you as equal. He’s challenging us to love because with love comes power. With love comes change. With love we find something new. When we write people out of the book and claim they are too evil, too vile, they’ve made too many wrong choices we play God. We become the very thing we hate. And we deny the humanity of that person or that group. We deny them a sense of belonging, perpetuating the cycle of loneliness and violence. When people feel loved, when we continue to see the potential for change in even the worst of us, we leave the door open for real belonging and real change. Loving the enemy is the only way we will survive this age of terror as it has been called. Walter wink says “ Either we find the God who causes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, or we may have no more sunrises.” We can become the hate and be consumed with the very darkness we’re fighting, or we can choose love and always see the good, always see potential for change.

Of course it feels impossible to forgive anyone who would continue to allow guns to fall into the hands of a person who could murder innocent children just for fame or to prove a point. In fact, I would say it’s even natural to feel a deep rooted rage right now. And I don’t think that’s wrong. What loving the enemy when we’re filled with rage and hatred does, is it forces us into grace. Where the divine forgiveness of God can burst even in the darkest grief and free us to love. I don’t want it to feel like I’m saying skip over the grief and the rage and go straight to forgiveness. The hate, the rage, the grief you feel, is valid and GOOD. What I’m urging for myself and for all of you, is don’t get stuck there. Use the hate and the rage to propel you forward into making change. If we choose to sit in the pain and the rage, real change will never happen.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean we’re giving a free pass to abuse or forgetting it ever happened. It’s a path to freedom to see the potential over the rage. Jesus lived this, embodied this even in his dying breath when he shouted, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” And Martin Luther King Jr lived this, in fact this idea of love your enemy was the very breath and life of the entire civil rights movement.

The week of the Marches in Selma, Alabama which was a crucial point of the civil rights movement. There was a gathering of activists outside of Ebenezer Baptist church. A black funeral home operator from Montgomery arrived at the church an began sharing a story of a group of student demonstrators that had been beaten near the capital shortly before his arrival at the church. The students had been surrounded by police officers on horseback, barred from escape and beaten by said police. This circle of mounted officers would block ambulances from entering to assist the students for two hours. The gathered crowd grew increasingly angry. Across the street stood in rank a line of Alabama State Troopers and the Local Sheriff Jim Clark. Amongst the rage and hate Reverend James Bevel stepped up to the mic and said:

“We aren’t just fighting for our rights, but for the good of the whole society. It’s not enough to defeat Jim Clark- do you hear me Jim?- we want you converted. We cannot win by hating our oppressors. We have to love them into changing.”

Jim Clark went on to change and later confess that he was wrong in his bias toward blacks. Not because they over powered him, or because their hate was greater. But because they chose to love him, because they reflected his own humanity back at him and hoped in his potential for change. Because they included him as human, as worthy of love, and respect even if he wouldn’t yet give it to them in return.

When we choose to see the humanity in the people perpetuating systems of oppression (cough cough the politicians and billionaires). We see them as people harmed by the very system they’re trying to uphold. We begin to see their insistence as fear, fear of losing their livelihood, fear of losing the only way of life they’ve ever known. We see that they have mortgages and families to feed that tie them to the economic system that’s harming us all. We see that they are under immense pressure from all sides to save face, to look like they have it together. When we see them as human we see them for what they really are, and it allows us to hate the system instead of the people and then work together toward changing it.

Gandhi worked hard to exude this in his approach to change. Trying to convince his opponents that they were fighting not just for victory over their opponents but for fundamental justice for all. Gandhi and his followers refused to use the Nykon Temple road for months after securing the right for untouchables to use it, as a way to buy time for the people in positions of power to make it look as if they backed down of their own ideas rather than surrendering. Gandhi referred to this way of protest as non-violence of the strong. Defining it as seeking the opponents good by freeing him or her from oppressive actions.

Right now holding onto this hope feels hard. But if you can hold on even by a tiny thread, hold on. Because we need you in the fight. This needs to be collective. This needs to be done in community. We have to rise up and become the very thing they don’t want us to be, together. The system wants us operating as cogs in a wheel, angry at each other. Because if we’re so consumed with our own lives and hating our neighbors because they’re different than us we ignore the real problem. The system that sees us as replaceable. We have to set aside our differences and choose to fight for a better world for ourselves and for our children. It’s slow going, a fight that’s raged on for generations. But look how far we’ve come! If you can’t hold onto hope for tomorrow’s change just yet, hold onto the hope from yesterday. See how far Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Ghandi move the needle, and look for them all around you. Because in them you’ll find the kingdom.

We’ll close with one last quote before we open up to communion Marxist Milan Machovec said:

“The enemy must be resisted in so far as he serves the power of darkness, although it would be better to say that the power of darkness should be resisted rather than the enemy. He should be seen not as the servant of darkness but as someone who is capable of future conversion. Therefore, though he uses evil means- despotism, the sword, force, darkness- one must not answer him with these same means. If one answered him in kind, with lies, deceit, violence and force, one would be denying oneself and him the future and the possibility of change, one would be perpetuating the kingdom of evil.”